The disclosed embodiments relate generally to a method for processing and printing print job portions and, more particularly, to an approach in which print output stacks are separated during printing by reference to an output related attribute, such as an output related attribute for at least one offline finishing device.
Creation and production of printed documents often involves many production and finishing operations that are highly variable with each job. In general, the various operations can be grouped into three major phases: 1) creation of the document information, including prepress operations that render the document in a form suitable for printing, 2) printing of the information onto some form of media such as paper, and 3) finishing of the selected media into a completed document. These 3 major phases often have many sub-phases, and the entire process may vary from relatively simple to extremely complex.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,462,756 B1 to Hansen et al. discloses a system and method for managing production printing workflow. The system includes workflow management software for managing and facilitating the procedural stages of the workflow including job origination, job preparation, job submission and job fulfillment. The workflow management software provides an integrated object oriented interface which visually reflects and interacts with the workflow. The software further provides functionality for efficient page level modifications to documents at the job preparation stage. This functionality allows such modifications to be easily made to selected pages and visually verified by displaying visual representations of the modifications on visual representations of the pages.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,092,963 B2 to Ryan et al. discloses a print production and finishing system for electronic management and control of a wide range of finishing processes characterized by input from multiple production operations and equipment that, depending upon the job, might be variably applied to work pieces that themselves are highly variable between different jobs. The disclosed embodiments of the '963 patent are applicable to many operations where processes for production of work pieces are managed separately from processes for finishing and packaging of such work pieces.
The pertinent portions of all of the above-mentioned patents are incorporated herein by reference.
Traditionally, when a document is composed, the person doing the composition will create one or more electronic image files that represent the parts of the document to be produced. These electronic image data files may be stored in many different formats by many different document creation and manipulation programs. For instance, for a complex document such as a book that utilizes color printing for book covers and pictorial inserts, any of a variety of Page Description Languages (PDLs), such as Postscript® and Postscript-compatible languages, may be used to render the color images in printable form. Often different components within a document will utilize different PDLs. For instance, the cover may be created by a different work team or upon different equipment than photographic reprints or other internal color components. Each prepress team or prepress device may utilize a PDL optimized for its use. For pages comprised of simple monochrome text, desk-top publishing programs may be utilized to render such pages or a simpler word processing language may be utilized. Still other prepress formats may be utilized for printing of inserts, dividers, and other possible components internal to the finished document. There also may be included in the assembly/finishing job non-printed components such as, without limitation, plastic separators, previously printed sheets retrieved from inventory, photographically produced sheets, or specialized media such as vinyl disk holders or perfume sample packs.
Workflows of the type described in the U.S. Pat. No. 6,462,756 are typically well suited for handling normal sized jobs of definite length, but not necessarily jobs of “indefinite length.” Indefinite length jobs are jobs so large that no component in the workflow is generally capable of handling the entire job. An example of an indefinite length job is a variable data job that can run into the tens or even hundreds of thousands of individual variable information (“VI”) records. An indefinite length VI can be challenging to execute because oftentimes the original input PDL VI record order must be maintained from PDL generation, through production to shipping.
The challenge associated with executing an indefinite length job can be further compounded when it becomes necessary to use imposition. In one approach, an indefinite length job is imposed in what is referred to as cut & stack, cut & marry, z-sort, or zip sort imposition. This imposition flows the original document pages vertically though a printed stack one multi-up position at a time. This permits the printed stack to be cut into multiple stacks that can then be combined to recreate the original document. Cut & stack imposition finds use in the printing of credit card statements where the statements of many customers may be printed together as one large job.
Execution of indefinite length jobs can become particularly problematic when the printed stack is larger than the output capacity of the stacker, as is often the case when printing an indefinite length job. For those instances in which the original document pages flow vertically through the entire printed stack, the document cannot be finished until all pages of the imposed document are printed. Execution of certain indefinite length jobs (e.g. a 500,000 page credit card statement run), can result in document stacks that cannot realistically be sent to a bindery for finishing.
To alleviate the problem resulting from oversized document stacks, imposition applications may set a “stack depth” parameter that sets a maximum number of sheets through which contiguous input document pages may be vertically flowed. Smaller stacks containing a contiguous portion of the original input document result so that a cut & stack process can be employed without waiting for the entire job to finish printing. Although this enhancement of setting stack height can mean the difference between imposing or not imposing a given indefinite length job, it still does not necessarily result in efficient finishing of infinite length jobs.
It would be desirable to provide an enhancement for handling infinite length jobs in such a way as to enable better parallelism in finishing the resulting output. In particular, such enhancement might include evaluating constraints from business rules and finishing devices to determine an optimal approach for flowing a document though imposition so that portions of the infinite length job could be processed in a variety of finishing operations without losing confidence in the ability to reconstitute the original input document.
In accordance with a first aspect with the disclosed embodiments there is disclosed a method of processing and printing print job portions, comprising: (A) providing an output related attribute for at least one offline finishing device, the output related attribute for the at least one finishing device corresponding with a first print output stack height; (B) dividing at least a portion of one or more print jobs, with the first print output stack height, into a first section including a first set of pages and a second section including a second set of pages, wherein the first section corresponds with a first print output stack having a second print output stack height and the second section corresponds with a second print output stack having a third print output stack height; (C) providing a print output stack processing instruction to define a boundary between the first section and the second section; (D) printing the portion of the one or more print jobs to output the first and second print output stacks; and (E) during said output of (D), separating the first print output stack from the second print output stack with the output stack processing instruction.
In accordance with a second aspect of the disclosed embodiments there is disclosed a method of processing and printing print job portions, comprising: (A) providing an output related attribute; (B) dividing at least a portion of the one or more print jobs, with the output related attribute, into a first set of information corresponding with a first set of pages and a second set of information corresponding with a second set of pages, wherein the first set of pages corresponds with a first print output stack having a first print output stack height and the second set of information corresponds with a second print output stack having a second print output stack height; (C) providing a print output stack processing instruction to define a boundary between the first section and the second section; (D) printing the portion of the one or more print jobs to output the first and second print output stacks; and (E) during said output of (D), separating the first print output stack from the second print output stack with the output stack processing instruction.